EA has begun backpedalling faster than a politican in an election year. The company has begun reaching out to blogs about Rock Band’s expiration notice that began popping up yesterday. We reported that Rock Band was tossing up a notification to its users that read “On May 31, ROCK BAND will no longer be playable on your device. Thanks for rocking out with us!”
Today, it’s being deemed a misunderstanding and a mistake by EA’s PR team:
“Rock Band for iOS will remain live – the in-app message users received yesterday was sent in error,” a representative for EA told us. “We apologize for the confusion this caused. We’re working to clarify the issue that caused the error and will share additional information as soon as possible.”
Mistake, or simply busted? Because sending out an accidental push notification to all of your customers stating that you’re effectively treating their app purchase more like a rental is a pretty big error. It’s great that they’re letting people play the game still, but we can’t help but wonder what would have happened had the blogosphere not run with the story.
Our guess? EA would have disabled the game. That accidental push notifcation was way too specific to be a mistake. It’s not like it was a string of random characters or a smiley face, was it? The only mistake here was that they got caught red-handed. Let’s call a spade a spade.
